If we want to set smart goals for improving climate change outcomes we need to incentivize adoption of electric vehicles. There is no barrier to adoption in this article that couldn’t be overcome with smart incentives. No new tech needed. Winners: all of humanity! Losers: energy companies too slow to adapt.

The International Energy Agency has estimated that electric vehicles would have to account for at least 40 percent of passenger vehicle sales by 2040 for the world to have a chance of meeting the climate goals outlined in the Paris agreement, keeping total global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

There is a way for energy companies to thrive in the renewable era. This Dutch company is repositioning itself as an energy service provider. They don’t sell kilowatts. They sell kws + services for consumers.

Eneco has sought to provide new services to customers — and, in doing so, to enter new sectors, like the charging of electric vehicles and the repair of solar panels.

“What we are trying to do is switch from selling a pure commodity to selling energy as a service.”

For instance, Eneco owns Jedlix, an electric vehicle charging unit, which has partnerships with Tesla and BMW and allows car owners to recharge their vehicles inexpensively when there are large supplies of renewable energy on the grid. Jedlix sometimes even pays them to do so.

This sounds like the blythe statements CEOs often make, but don’t mean about environmental concerns.

This article makes it sound like they are practicing what they preach in Vermont.

Green Mountain’s chief executive, Mary Powell, sees the program here as the best way to please customers while making the system more environmentally and physically sustainable.

As a practical matter, the less electricity the utility pulls from the regional transmission system, especially at times of peak demand, the less it has to pay in fees, producing savings it can pass on to customers. One way it does this is by remotely controlling the batteries installed through its programs, drawing upon the stored energy as needed.

The States will have to make up for what the Federal Government can’t do for the climate.

The Brookings Institution reported this month that between 2000 and 2014, 33 states and the District of Columbia cut carbon emissions while expanding their economies. That list includes red states run by Republican legislatures, like Alaska, Georgia, Tennessee and West Virginia.
In some states, including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and parts of Texas, new wind turbines can generate electricity at a lower cost, without subsidies, than any other technology, according to a report published this month by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Climate change shouldn’t be framed as a war. There’s no us vs. them. The author makes that case that we need to see it as a revolution. In so doing we don’t need a war machine to produce our way out of the problem. We need to revolutionize the way we produce and consume energy and who does and doesn’t benefit from that.

if we understand that the enemy is not our physical environment, but the unjust social relations that allow some to gain at the expense of and risk to others, then technological solutions can be a part, but only a part, of the plan.